


You're Still My Brother: A Life Defined Through Other People

by armlessphelan



Category: Autobiographical - Fandom
Genre: Autobiography, Other, not fandom - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 05:04:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7561516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armlessphelan/pseuds/armlessphelan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is my story. It's who I am. It's who I was. This is a collection of anecdotes and tales told to the best of my recollection, with no filters to make anyone look better or worse than what they truly are. I'm sorry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: My Grandfather

My story is one of loss. There is little in the way of addition, and whenever there was it would be temporary: a few months at best. Nearly every subtraction wound up permanent. Be it death or disinterest, my circumstances would only ever change for the worse.

I don't remember much of my life before the age of eight. I suppose that it's because they were happy and stable years. Part of me probably doesn't want to remember them because then I'd know just how much I truly have lost in my life. But the big, defining moment of my childhood is when my grandfather died.

My memories of my grandfather preceding his death are nearly nonexistent. As a greeting to me, and only me, he would say “get outta here”. My entire family thought it was cute. I don't remember if I took it seriously. The only instance of it I really recall is the time I replied that he should leave and he started to act like he was. I broke down crying and begged him not to go.

He was my mother's dad. Henry Penix was the only grandfather I ever claimed. I suppose I was lucky he died when I was young so I wouldn't have too many bad memories of him. The only memories I do have are fleeting. Everyone else in the family remembers him fondly. Even my cousin, the one who was three when the old man died, he has more memories than I do. There is probably a reason I don't remember him. It's probably a good one.

But I do remember when I learned he died. It was my first experience with death. I was eight and had just walked in the house with my brother: the school bus dropped us off in front of the house. They often do that in suburban areas. My mom was crying and told us what had happened. She hugged us on the stairs and we all cried with her. It was the day before my brother turned ten years old.

The only other memory from that time that I have is from his funeral. I didn't want to see the body. My mother made me. She made me kiss his cheek even though I didn't want to do so. He was cold and stiff. Every since, I've had problems being around dead bodies. Funerals make me nervous. Scared. All I wanna do is bolt from the procession and hide away from people.

But his death was probably the most important moment of my life. Because I remember almost nothing from before, but I know that after everything changed. None of it was for the better.


	2. Mother

I don't remember my mother ever being happy. My family wasn't anything special: we were a blended family, but nobody ever really knew to look at us. My sister was my half sister from my father's previous marriage. Her mother had lost custody and my mother adopted her before my I was born.

My mother was the black sheep of her family, and my father was the black sheep of his. When they got married, my grandparents on my mother's side boycotted the wedding because my father was divorced. With time, they accepted him and my sister as family.

When it comes to having a relationship with her kids, my mother never really had them. My sister resented that she didn't know anything about her biological mother: we kids would get in trouble if we ever said her name out loud. My brother was the middle child and had all the complexes that came along with it. I was the youngest, I was her baby, and I was the one that broke her heart the hardest.

Most of my memories as a little kid are with my mother. She stayed at home to take care of us kids and the house while my father worked. I have memories of nap time involving falling asleep in her bed to The Young and the Restless, and then waking up for As the World Turns. She would cook dinner for when my siblings got home from school and my father got off work, because they were half an hour apart.

Things didn't really change much after I started school. We still had dinner at night as a family and went to church on Sunday mornings. On weekends, we would go to my grandparents' house and sometimes we kids got to spend the night. Then my grandfather died.

It wasn't a sudden shift in character for my mother. We did stop going to church regularly for a few years, which had a huge effect on me later in life, but she still cooked for the most part. We still saw my grandmother every Friday afternoon and every so often we kids would stay for the weekend.

The big change was in the housework. It wasn't noticeable at first: my sister picked up the a lot of the slack. She would cajole my brother and I into helping her. We were reluctant, because most kids are, but I would pitch in more than my brother because my sister was my best friend. She was my protector.

My own bedroom, though, was a mess. We kids were never really taught to make a bed or anything along those lines. Hell, to this day I still don't know how to properly attach a fitted sheet. It was just a matter of every few months, my parents would make my brother and I clean our rooms. After clearing out from under the bed and pulling junk out of the closet, there were about four trash bags stuffed full of random garbage. Neither my brother nor I really did learn how to keep clean houses.

As the years wore on, my sister eventually moved out and what little force there was to keep the house clean disappeared. My mother still wasn't working, but she was still cooking dinner every night. But we no longer sat at the kitchen table: it became too cluttered with dirty dishes and random debris. Once upon a time, we were not allowed to eat in the living room. It eventually became the only room in the house where one could eat.

The entire house became like my childhood bedroom: trash all over the floor and furniture. Random junk spilling out from any available nook or cranny. And I was told it was my fault. My mother used to scream at my brother and I that we were lazy and worthless because we just laid around doing nothing while the house fell to ruin. We just dirtied the place up and she couldn't keep up with us. Sometimes, she would even hit us over it.

I say she hit us, but she would argue it was just spanking. Sometimes, it was. But when you make a child (all the way through high school, even) bare their naked asses and put their hands on the wall just to give them ten lashes with a leather belt? Sometimes twenty? And always at full strength? That's hitting. And there were occasions where she would push us kids into walls or slap us in the face.

But it was just sometimes that she would hit us. It was usually our father who dealt out the physical violence. My mother tended to be more emotionally abusive. Such as blaming the children for the house being a wreck when they were gone all day and she just laid in bed watching TV and eating potato chips, or she assembled computers.

Because my mother learned that she loved computers. The woman became obsessed with them: she would buy old computers just to tear them apart and build slightly better ones. But the old, broken pieces never got thrown away. Nothing was ever thrown away. There were times when it was impossible to find a single piece of furniture upon which to sit for fear of disturbing her computer parts.

But we children were always given such things as laptops or desktops of our own when she was done fixing one. Yes, they were often obsolete and we were never allowed to take the laptops out of the house for fear of someone stealing them, but we still had them. It was never a good thing, though, because she would give us new ones even though our old ones still worked and had files that we wanted to keep and she never gave us time to transfer. She still has an obsession with computers, though she doesn't really build them anymore. She just buys new computers and tablets and hoards the old ones.

When I learned what hoarding was, it changed my life and put so many things into perspective. I learned that it wasn't my fault the house was a wreck, even though over half my life I'd been told otherwise. Last I knew, she admitted to being a hoarder but was incredibly reluctant to take any steps to really address it. I semi-regularly purge myself of physical possessions so that I don't wind up a hoarder.

But the hoarding wasn't the thing that ruined my mother's relationship with her children. It was always going to be tenuous because she didn't know how to give love because she never received it as a child. No, what ultimately ruined her ability to connect to her children was her church. She and my father did eventually go back some time after my grandfather died, but by that time I and my siblings had grown accustomed to not going to church. Suddenly, where we used to sleep on Sunday mornings, we were expected to get up and go to church.

I hated the church. It was stuffy and boring and we were strict Freewill Baptists. That meant that any improper action at any time could cause a person to be damned to hell. Churches operated independently and the Bible was the final authority on all things. It generally sucked. My brother or I would fall asleep in the pew only to be rewarded with an elbow to the rib or a smack to the back of the head.

Then I came out of the closet. I was twelve years old and figuring myself out. I thought I might be bisexual (I later figured out I was gay) and told some people I went to school with. They weren't surprised. Emboldened by this, I came home from school and told my mother I was bisexual and she started crying. Then she looked me in the eye and said that I didn't lover her because I dared to say something so horrible.

Later that day, when my dad got home, things got uglier. There was a lot of screaming and crying and threats of being beat or eternal damnation. I don't remember a whole lot of specifics. I try not to remember things like that. But that night changed something in me.

I became a terrible person in response to my parents shunning me. I was verbally abusive to other, but I was physically abusive to myself. My interests became darker and I figured that if I was going to hell, then I'd earn it. But I didn't turn to drugs or alcohol. I turned to writing and reading.

After my sister left, I had no more protector. All I had were the books I would read to escape and the stories I would write to create. But I didn't create stories about happy people or things with happy endings. My characters always ended up dead or alone. When I write now? It's still the case the majority of the time.

But my mother hated it. She hated what I wrote and would yell at me to write something nice and Christian. I hated Christianity. I went to a Methodist church with a friend from school once, and my parents told me I was never allowed to go back because Methodists were disgusting sinners who let women preach and that I would go to Hell if I ever went back. So I started looking into other religions. None of it fit me. Not Wicca, or Buddhism, or even Satanism.

As I was learning about religion on my own, I was learning biology in class. My two lives were intersecting and I ended up an atheist. My parents were as mad about that as they were my sexuality. We would scream at each other all the time and I began to refuse going to church. The times I did go were under threat of physical violence. Sometimes, it did happen and I was forcibly dragged to the car. It was an ugly situation. It haunts me to this day because I would hear “I'll pray for you” as the threat it was intended to be.

My grandmother died the day before I graduated from high school. That event is what caused my mother to fully shut down as a human being. She never really recovered, though she thinks otherwise. My grandmother's death was also what killed what little bit of family I had. After that, we just became strangers who shared DNA.

The hoarding became worse. The building of computers slowed, though the collection of computer parts kept growing. I missed going to my classmates' graduation parties because I was at the house trying to call my brother because everyone else was at the hospital as she died.

Deaths are when people come together or push each other away. My grandmother's death was when everyone pushed each other away. The cousins that were there in my childhood, practically siblings, became nobodies. Our parents were all fighting over the house, and even when my mother bought out her brothers' shares the fighting continued. I did my best to stay out of it.

My mother drove me to work until I was 20 and had my own license. I gave $20 every week in gas money. Work became my escape. I got promoted to management within four months of getting my first job at Save-A-Lot, then left that for a better paying one. My employment success was the only thing my parents would brag about. They didn't care that I had no friends and they were happy that I was too busy to date guys.

My sister died while I was at Menards. I don't... It didn't change my life much. My mother was already unable to function as a person, but it did affect my dad. Neither one of them has really dealt with it.

Then I was fired from my job at Menards. It happened in late 2009, just as the economy was going to shit. I ended up qualifying for unemployment, but I had been fired just as I was planning to move out and live on my own. I spent the next three years not being employed and not being social. I became mean. Well, meaner. While I was always pleasant and friendly in work environments, I was an absolute pissant at home.

Eventually, I did get another job, I was back at Save-A-Lot, and my parents moved into my grandmother's old home. I stayed in the home where I grew up so they could keep insurance on the place. It was a good arrangement. It worked for three years. I worked and did nothing else, and they were on the other side of the county.

Then something happened to change it: I made friends. I spent time with these people. I liked these people and they liked me. I was happy for the first time in my life: I was genuinely happy. My mother thought I was replacing her with these people and I was. My life was finally starting to look up.

I quit my job at Save-A-Lot. It is related to the friends I made, but they weren't the cause. Management became unbearable and I couldn't stay and keep my dignity as a human. My parents were livid when they found out, even though I'd taken financial precautions before I quit. I never had to ask them for money. I hated asking them for money and often went hungry as a result.

Still, I was spending time with my friends. They eventually welcomed me as family. I was at the hospital when they had their baby and they told me I was his uncle. My sister had two daughters before she died and my brother had a son, but I had no connection to those children. This was my nephew. I held him the night he was born and kissed his forehead.

I wrecked my car during my unemployment and didn't have the funds to fix it, so I just started walking places. My old home was in the suburbs. It was a two hour walk to anywhere of merit, but I did it anyway. Still, it got to be too much so I swallowed my reservations and asked my mother if I could borrow her truck until I had a job and could afford to fix my car. She and my father lent it to me with the condition that I only use it to drive to job interviews or dropping off applications.

I agreed and broke the agreement. I was visiting a friend after checking up on an application because she lived two streets away from the place I was checking. My parents called me to ask where the truck was, because they'd stopped by the house. I told them I was out. They ended up driving by my friends house and seeing the truck. They demanded I go home immediately.

I went home a few hours later and when they showed up I told them to take the truck. My dad kept talking about how I'd made an agreement and that I needed to keep my word, and I told him I couldn't do that. We started screaming. Things escalated to a physical level and I wound up homeless.

For a few weeks, I bounced from place to place until I reached the point where I checked myself into a mental institution because I just wanted to die. While there, I was improving until I was told my parents knew I was there. I almost lost it in front of my social worker. She recommended I have a meeting with them. I agreed. A third party let them know when it was and gave them the phone numbers to the ward where I was staying.

My parents didn't show up for the meeting and I was discharged. The place I was staying before I went into the ward didn't want me there anymore, but I had someone else offer me a place to stay in Florida. I accepted. The day before I was supposed to leave, I finally agreed to have a meeting with my parents at Taco Bell. It was a disaster. Two minutes into the conversation, my father was accusing me of lying about the diagnosis of PTSD I had received and my mother did nothing to assuage the situation. Instead, after I stormed out of the restaurant, she ran to social media to talk about how horrible I was. She'd been doing it for awhile but I didn't know or care.

I haven't spoken to her since that day at the Taco Bell. She and my father have both sent me text messages, but I only replied to tell them to leave me alone.


End file.
